Elbow Macaroni Love Cascade

An unpublished book of hybrid couplings. Remixing, sampling, and mashing are the composing methods; "twinning" the organizational logic. The short fictions and poetry came first, composed using language culled and reworked from books found in flea markets, garage sales, and public library discard shelves: young adult biographies, romantica, kitschy horror paperbacks, pulp detective novels, outdated software manuals, commentaries by clairvoyants, vintage hygiene primers, old grammar handbooks. (Images below; text not shown.)

Later I worked up a collage for each of the pieces—visual captions triggered by the corresponding text. As with the writing, the images draw from found materials: old encyclopedias, ancient newspapers, vintage fabrics, wallpaper samples, and crumbling ephemera.

The manuscript is a sustained exercise in call and response on several levels. Texts are a mishmash of juxtaposed voices. Various materials interact within the images. And in the gutter between each pairing, an inferred dialogue starts to manifest. At least that’s the idea.